


Deep Blue Water

by priggishbitch



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, He has the most feelings of anyone ever, POV Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings, lOvE iS a ChEmIcAl DeFeCt, lets be clear, post season four kind of thing, sherlock holmes is an entire dumbass, there be family here, you love like 80 people sherlock, you're a big dumb softie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26439211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/priggishbitch/pseuds/priggishbitch
Summary: Sherlock has a delayed adverse reaction to the drugs Eurus gave him and is unconscious, trapped in his own mind and desperate to find a way out.
Relationships: Eurus Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes & Greg Lestrade, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes & Mary Morstan, Sherlock Holmes & Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock Holmes & Rosamund Mary "Rosie" Watson, Sherlock Holmes & Sherlock Holmes' Father & Sherlock Holmes' Mother, Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 12
Kudos: 52





	Deep Blue Water

**Author's Note:**

> Lookie here, my dear friend, this is pure wish fulfillment on my part. I love Sherlock and I love Molly and I think they deserved something more than what they got, but Molly's smile as she comes into Sherlocks flat at the end of the show give me hope that something happened that we missed getting to see. Maybe its bad, maybe it makes no sense and that's okay with me. I hope y'all like it.
> 
> I actually didn't read this before posting it but I just went through and did a metric fuck-ton of editing so if y'all see anything else pls lemme know

I remember little after watching them load Eurus onto the helicopter.

“Greg!” He stopped what he was saying and looked over at me, “My blood pressure is falling quite rapidly. I estimate oh, three seconds…” It had been less than three seconds. I felt the impact of the dirt, heard the shouting. I was in and out then, fading between the real world and my own. Soft hands lifted my head.

_“How come you never told John when your birthday was?” Molly was hanging her coat over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, we’d just eaten far too much cake._

_“Never liked birthdays.”_

_“Okay, well, then I am sorry, but I stopped and grabbed you a present on the way. Here.” She sets a simple, brown box in my hand. She learned her lesson the last time. Inside is a scarf, not dissimilar to the one I usually favor only it’s a light grey and softer than anything I own. Expensive. I double it up around my neck and thank her, tell her that it truly is lovely. She only shrugs._

_“Down to business then.” She places the back of her hand against my forehead, “That’s good.” Brushes a stray curl away from my eyes, places a gentle finger under my chin and tilts my face up, “Look at me.” She examines my eyes, equal, round, and reactive. The moment stretches on longer than she intended and a pink blush moves over her face. She kneels and takes my arm, carefully folding the sleeve of my shirt, feels my pulse and nods. I am always struck by how careful she is with me. Soft hands, always touching my skin as if one move too sudden might shatter me to bits. A kindness I do not deserve, could never hope to earn. Unwilling as I am to admit it, when she examines the needle marks on my arms, fingertips ghosting over them, it feels very nice. Soft hands. She rolls my sleeve back down and buttons it. “They’re healing really well. Now, please tell me the truth.”_

_“Of course, Molly.”_

_“Is there any more? Here in the flat?”_

_I so want to lie, to keep it here and feel as if the option is open._ _**Just in case.** _ _But she is looking into my eyes with an earnest that means that I can’t. I jerk my head towards my bedroom door and lead her in. I move the bed and flip up the rug, press the heel of the £800 shoes my mother buys me into a hinged panel in the floor. When it opens her knees smack against the floor with a thud, she could almost be praying if I didn’t know she was just heartbroken. She lifts the vials out, holding them a careful distance from her body._

_“Is this the last of it?” No. I nod anyway and watch as her face goes rigid. I hear the words in my head before she says them. “Lie, Sherlock. That’s a lie.”_

_Addicts occasionally deceive even themselves._

_She storms from the room, stomping and when I get to her, she’s already flushed the contents of the vials, thrown them in the waste bin and is standing stock-still in the dead center of my sitting room, revolving slowly, inspecting, hands on her waist, knuckles white with tension. She stomps to my chair and sits down, still searching. Ah, there she goes. The vase filled with half-dead flowers is in her hands before I can think to do anything and she’s slipping her nail through the seal of the false bottom. Now those are gone, too._

_“I’m going to make tea. Would you like some?” My nod is almost invisible. Molly dusts the knees of her velvety-looking blue trousers, a nervous tick, and sets off to work._

The sound of helicopter blades is louder than you would imagine, so loud it feels like a thudding headache. John is above me when my eyes open, he smiles, relief in his features. “It’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it? The fainting.”

“I’ve learned from the best.”

“It’s going to be alright, Sherlock. We’re on our way to the hospital.” Probably a good idea.

_It’s been suggested to me quite a number of times that I do not have a heart. This, of course, is untrue. I very much possess a heart, it beats in my chest like everyone else. What I lack is the clear show of emotion most people expect. Those things stay inside my head. I do love, if not the normal way, than in my own way. Though, I can count the number of people I’ve loved on less than both hands. I love Mycroft. I don’t like him, but he is my brother, my protector. He has been there from the first bad day and every one since. I love my parents in the uncomplicated way most children love their parents, though I don’t like them all that much, either. Feelings outside of my immediate family get significantly murkier, more complex. Let’s work our way from the outside of the web, the least complicated, to the center._

_Mrs. Hudson is a particularly unique feeling. Not quite the same as my mother, but something similar, something comfortable, this strange creature, filled with multitudes. She was an awful lot like myself to be honest, different faces for different people, never quite unmasking even when we were alone._

_Greg is to me what I assume brothers in a fraternity feel like towards each other. Bound together by time and common motivations. I wouldn’t be happy if he were no longer here, we will leave it at that._

_John was a different animal, so many feelings stuffed in to this sort of relationship. Brotherly constancy like Mycroft. Affection like lifetime friends. People had attempted befriending me in the past. Eventually I would say something. Well, truthfully, I would say many somethings until one of them stuck and I was alone again. John was, to say the least, an outlier in my personal relationships. Putting up with me no matter how much havok I’ve wrought. Not even when the horrible things I say got his wife murdered in front of him._

_Mycroft's voice reverberates through my skull, gong-like and painful, “You go in for that sort of thing now.”_

_Mary. Lovely, kind, intelligent Mary. I imagine what I feel for Mary could be described as something akin to what one feels for a very dear little sister. At least what normal people would feel towards their normal little sisters. “I do so like you.” She had told me, voice shaky and tired. I can’t think about her, it hurts too much. Moving on._

_I had been shocked by how I felt for Rosie. I had always had a fondness for children. They held none of the pretense that adults enjoyed so much. The world was free and open and full of curiousities for the interested mind. All children are scientists after all, willing to question everything, desperate for knowledge. They see things, understand things, perceive things, that adults simply can not. We lose that with age. But there’s something that happens when two of the people you love most in the world have a child. Nothing can prepare you for the unbridled affection you will have for this tiny creature, the best of both your loved ones in a conveniently arm-sized package. I felt something after her birth, something I could compare to the to the love I hold for my parents, reversed. Instead of feeling protected, I felt a desperate need to protect and shield her from life’s little indignities. It had been pure, undiluted and world-changing._

_There was Eurus. My sister I hadn’t known existed. The feelings were new and raw. I loved her for the reasons that we are alike, the bone deep sense of loneliness that pervades our mind, even in a room filled with people. The desperate, ongoing need for love. That sort of voice in the back of our heads._ _**Please, love me. Please please please.** _ _I hated her for the more obvious reasons. She had just gone out of her way to torture me and the people I cared for._ _**Vivisection.** _ _She had ripped the lot of us to shreds without so much as a backwards glance at the mess she’d left behind. She had tried to force me to shoot my brother, she had made me break, no, she had made me dismantle Molly piece by piece the way I did her coffin. I had ripped her foundation to bits better than any explosive could have._

_Molly. Molly Hooper. Molly Louise Hooper. I had always referred to her as ‘my Molly’ in my head. I never thought for a moment I might have meant it romantically, not in the way she did. I’d long seen it as a sign of my inhumanity, that I saw her not as an autonomous person, but a thing in my collection of things. I had chalked the ache in my gut at the introduction of Jim from IT to a base protective need, covetous over my poessessions. This man had been unworthy. I should have seen through myself years ago, always so desperately ignorant. I should have noticed at the little Christmas party at Baker St. I smelled her perfume before I saw her, I knew it so well by then. When I did look up she was taking her jacket off and my first thought had been ‘her hair looks very soft, I wonder if she would let me put my hands in it. For science, of course. A blog on hair products, possibly.' The next thought was that I wanted to cover her with my own coat. It was frigid and she was thin, too thin. The material of her dress had not been made for this weather. Lastly, was the dawning and oddly painful reaction that she had gone to this trouble for a man. More than likely, a man unworthy as the last._

_I did my clever little party trick, so bloody proud of myself, hoping that I could get her attention back on me. It had worked until I read the card. Molly Hooper had gone to this trouble for me. At least my deduction had been correct. The man she had done this for was unworthy, after all. Underneath the flayed-raw guilty feeling was something much more insidious. It had taken root that night and burrowed through my brain like ants, making my nervous system its home, always there, never dormant._

_The Woman had been something quite different. We had been so very much alike, doing whatever it took, hurting whoever if it accomplished our desired results. Irene and I were two sides of the same coin. I could never hurt her in the incidental, off-hand way I did Molly. No, Molly was a different sort of currency altogether, delicate and fragile. She had always been something my hands were too careless to hold. I was a hurricane, she a butterfly and my words held the power to strip her of her wings with just a gust of wind. I decided to keep my distance from her that Christmas, maintain the seperation that would keep her mostly out of harms way. Molly deserved much more than I was capable of offering. I would leave her to grow without my shade stunting her, even if I longed to be at my favorite microscope with her standing over my shoulder, the tip of her ponytail brushing the skin of my neck, the smell of her clouding the room._

_When I was in Serbia it was her that I saw when things got truly terrible, her always giving me more than I deserved, “You look sad. When you think he can’t see you. Are you okay? Don’t just say you are, because I know what that means—looking sad when you think no one can see you.” She had said it, meant it, “You can have me.” Oh, Molly. If only I were remotely human, I would._

_I enjoyed thinking about the Molly who had been there when I was resurrected. She didn’t seem like the same woman, not at all. Her perfume had changed, it was more mature, expensive, and smelt very nice actually, especially on her. She had also worn a ring, small but thoughtfully chosen. Tom._ _**Tom.** _ _What kind of a name was that, Tom? I doubted he was worthy of her either. The biggest change of all had just been her. The set of her shoulders, the tilt of her chin, the way her eyes did not shy away on contact like they used to. She had grown confident, comfortable in her skin, during my absence, with Tom. For this, I let sleeping dogs lie. I spent the next year of my life living inside the memory of her helping me on cases. I had made her laugh, truly laugh, not once, but twice. I had not felt vindicated when they broke up, quite the opposite really. My absence, his presence, had helped her growth. My presence brought on only destruction. You’d think I’d be used to it now, the wake of chaos I left in my path, always. But then again, no one had ever called me well-adjusted._

_The images blurred together and I was back at 221B, John is standing, raging at me, “She’s out there and she’s alive! You have no idea how lucky you are! That chance doesn’t last forever, it’s gone before you know it.” Of course, he’s referring to Irene Adler, The Woman who beat me, but John is like Moriarty in this respect and only in this respect. Always overlooking the one who matters the most. There’s only one woman who’s made me wish I was a better man. Irene had made me want to be more impressive, made me want to show off, made me vain, stoked the fire of my ego until it burned bright enough that it destroyed things and people around me. There’s only one woman who’d ever made me wish that I was good, maybe less clever, even, made me wish that I was human. John rolls his eyes, had I said all of that out loud? “Well, then, get out of bed and go get her.”_

_Mycroft is sitting behind his desk, swathed in unsettled blue light, shaking his head at me, “The roads we walk have demons beneath them.”_

_A child’s voice in the distance, “Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go.”_

_“There is an east wind coming, Sherlock. Now, wake the hell up!”_

I jolt awake violently, startling my brother who is sitting half asleep in the chair next to my hospital bed. “Nice to see you, brother-mine.” Mycroft looks weary, exhausted. Deep circles under his eyes and he hasn’t even bothered to change yet. _Sentiment is a defect found in the losing side._

“You’re wearing the same suit.” He rolls his eyes and taps his walking stick against the floor between the toes of shoes identical to my own. _Mummy._

“Well, I’ve been rather distracted.”

“Yes, how is Eurus?” Another feeling of guilt floods my stomach, the world is looking blue and unreal again, “I assume she didn’t actually get to go home?”

“Unfortunately, no. She is… she is too dangerous to be out. Though she seems to have… shut down… Just kind of sits and stares off. If you’re alright I have a list of things that need seeing to.” I wave him off, but I’m worried anyway. The thoughts are too heavy and I’m sinking through them, the nebulous blue water carries me under its current.

_I_ _**hated** _ _this memory. I’ve felt all manner of horrible things throughout my life. The look on Mycroft’s face when he found me that day, broken hearted, tired. The look on my mother’s face when we told her. The hurt in Molly’s face every time I insulted her. The one that comes back to me, usually as the drugs start to fade, leave my system wracked with an aching, desecating pain in my bones. I hear it now, I see it in perfect detail. It always starts in blackness, pitch black, cut only by the sound of a gunshot that brings the world into view like a switch. John on the floor, holding a bleeding, dying Mary, desperately trying to look strong as she declares her love for her family, myself included._ _**I so like you.** _ _The sound, the terrible sound that feels like a gunshot through my own chest, John’s gutteral primal wail of pain when her muscles relax, before he looks up at me and that burning hatred is in his eyes._

_I’m burning up. I’m at the bottom of a pit and I’m still falling and I’m never climbing out._

Someone shakes my shoulder, “Sherlock?” Something ebbed in my brain, a dense, heavy fog, “How long has he been asleep?”

I barely hear the other voice. “Looks like he was conscious on and off until they got him in the air ambulance and then he went out completely. And that was oh, one this morning, I think? So just a little over twenty hours.”

“Sherlock, wake up!” The voice is shaking me again. I’m trying, please. Be patient, I am trying. “Has he been given anything? Why won’t he wake up?”

“Ma’am, I’m really not supposed to…”

“No! No, don’t you start that! Doctor Molly Hooper, my name is on the bloody list! Mycroft bloody Holmes put me there himself. So help me God, tell me what is wrong with this man, damn it!” Well, done, Dr. Hooper, brava. “Please, I mean, to say.. Please, he’s my… he’s my family.” There are tears in her voice now, _my_ Molly is back, Dr. Hooper has apparently taken her leave.

“What I remember from last night was that Mr. Holmes was dosed with some sort of drug meant to make him unconcious. It seems like there was a number of other drugs still in his system, just remnants really. They didn’t get along and his heart stopped during the ride here. He should be okay now, just recovering. His scans are all okay, no permenant damage anyway other than his poor kidneys. He’s had a transfusion and electrolytes. He’ll take his time and wake up when he’s ready.”

Molly is here now, she’s here for me, she came for me even after what I did to her. Time to wake up, get up open your eyes, you melodramatic bastard. But the waves peak higher than ever and I’m sunk.

_Mary’s death had brought on a new sort of despair, something so malicious it felt intentional. I had already lost so, so many things in one final, efficient blow. Mary was gone. John had taken Rosie and cut himself off from me so effectively he might as well have gone with Mary. Molly and Mrs. Hudson had gone with him, not intentionally, but who would you pick in their situation? The man who lost his wife or the man who was so impressed with himself that he got someone you loved killed? An easy choice. I would choose John and Rosie over me, too. Easy._

_When Mary’s DVD had come I felt some modicum of renewed hope until I followed her instructions and the drugs infiltrated the corner of my mind where the light lived and snuffed it out, turned that bit of me desolate, too. “The only way to save John is to make him save you.’ Only no one had ever bothered to ask me if I wanted to be saved. No one had ever been quite so considerate as to ask me what it was that I wanted. Maybe I just wanted to shut it all down, give in to the deep, dark blue and wash away_ _in the currents. To sum it all up, I was fine with dying. In fact, it sounded so very peaceful. Maybe then the image of John’s eyes filled with so much hatred, the way Molly looked at me with so much sorrow and said “Anyone but you.”, would leave my mind and I could get some sleep, finally. I was so very tired._

_In the end, it had been Eurus who saved me, the sad girl come to my doorstep, her last hope. She had so convincingly led me to believe that she intended to end her life and that thought had unsettled me. I had lectured her, “Your own death is something that happens to everyone else. Your life is not your own, keep your hands off of it.” The world had faltered around me, I was livid with myself. I had to survive, if not for myself than for those who had already lost so much. I could not take anything else from them. The sudden end, the blessed, utter silence, the throbbing, aching, bleeding heart in my chest thump-thump-thumping to a halt, was not the life I had been destined for. No. I would soldier on, whether I wanted to or not._

_So, I had spent nearly a month taking my body to the edge of it’s admirable limits, tried desperately not to let the shame show when the color bled from Molly’s face as she examined me, as she held her stomach like she was stopping pieces of her from falling out. She had whispered my name in the back of her ambulance, a desperate prayer in anguish. I had wanted to fall to my knees then, apologize, beg for forgiveness. But this had to work, just so or it would all crash down. I would never get any of them back_ _if I let even the smallest piece of this carefully, painfully constructed facade slip. She would be the one to see the heart of me, even the parts John was blind to._

Mycroft was back this time, speaking to Molly in whispers.

“He was asking for you after he collapsed. Quite a lot, apparently. Just kept calling your name.”

I had? I want to open my eyes but I’m just so tired, so dizzy. My senses do the funny sort-of blurring thing and I am lost again.

_I don’t think I’ll be ashamed of saying, if I ever wake up, that these last twenty-four hours had been the worst of my life. Death, delirium, and tangible, viscous darkness. Eurus had out-gamed me in every since of the word. I had, once again, been taught my own insignificance in the world. She had damaged me in a way I was unprepared for, the commonness of childhood trauma. The sheer desperation of watching Molly on screen, unusually pale and drawn, circles under eyes that I knew in the darkest reaches of my soul were my fault. The sting of regret I felt for keeping a distance between us, the burning hum of rejection that made my skin ache as she refused my call, the absolute gut-wrenching relief when she answered the second time._ _I was giddy to have her voice in my ears, a child with a sweet, a dog whistle instilling me with the desire to go and find her._ _**Say it first.** _ _I had known she loved me, an abiding sort of romantic way that clung to her skin no matter how many times I tried to quash it, for her own good._ _**Say it first.** _ _I had felt something for Molly, trust, kinship, a desire to protect her from unworthy men, yes. Found myself going out of my way to spend time with her, yes. Wanted her attention all of the time, yes. Wanted her to choose me, yes. I remembered in that moment, her voice on the phone._ _**Say it first.** _ _Oh. OH. The realization had shot down my spine and skittered over my skin like electricity. I was. I was very much in love with Molly Hooper and had been for such a long, long time, had stifled and buried it so deeply that I hadn’t even known it._

_When John was safely out of the well, I’d allowed myself a moment to be lost in my own mind and meandered through my memories of Molly. They were all cast in a new light, soft and warm. The first time I met her she’d dropped a glass beaker on the floor at my feet. It had taken weeks to see her as something other than an idiot but we had grown quite accustomed to each other, comfortable, working together without needing to speak. I'd hidden myself in her flat when I needed space to think and I'd lain on her bed, lost in thought. The world around me had smelt so calming, like her. I felt safe there. When morning broke, I had fallen asleep and she had tucked me in. I hadn't wanted to leave. I found I had catalogued even what I would normally consider entirely useless details, kept it all tucked away and never deleted a moment. I’d kept record of her pulse, the tender, pink flush of her cheeks, the way she sat with one leg tucked under her and shoulders hunched as if attempting to take up as little space as possible. She had changed her perfume three… no, four times since we’d met. I had every moment of her etched in perfect technicolor, tucked away for safekeeping._

“I’m not mad at you, Sherlock. I know it wasn’t your fault. Please, wake up, John told me everything. Wake up. I’m begging you.”

_So many thoughts and feelings crowd through my head I can barely see them as they go. The smell of Culverton Smith, death, rot, and pure evil covered by expensive cologne, the feel of his hands covering my mouth and nose, the look of delight and excitement as I begged for my life. John’s fist splitting the skin on my forehead, the aching, purple bruises his fists left behind, delivering the punishment I had been craving._ _**He’s entitled, I killed his wife.** _ _The death blow,_ _**Yes, he did.** _ _The way Molly cradled the phone in her hands, like I could burn her even from a great distance._ _**Go on, you say it first.** _ _I love you. The notion rolling through my body like thunder, reverberating in devestating aftershocks. It was true, it had always been true. I love you. The gut-wrenching silence as the clock tick-tick-ticked down, the pure, floating bliss when she had whispered it back._ _The pain of wood shattering under my knuckles, the satisfying crunch as it broke into bits._

Molly is here now, my Molly. She’s here and she’s waiting.

_I was undercover, it had to be convincing, Magnussen would buy nothing less. Molly had been devastated, angry. The slap to my face is a jolt. Molly standing in front of me, her ridiculous scarf, tears welling in the boundless depths of her brown eyes. Maybe I’m not special, maybe I never was._ _**What do you need, Sherlock?** _ _Another unforgiving slap._ _**Would you like to go for coffee?** _ _She switches sides and her hand stings against my other cheek._

There’s a gentle pressure on my chest now, the sound of desolate love in my ears. Heart broken sobs against a wet spot in the flimsy hospital gown.

“Please, Sherlock. Please, please, please, wake up, Sherlock, I love you. I do so much, please wake up. “ The words are nearly indecipherable between shaky gasps for breath. I’m awake now, truly conscious. My mind isn’t capable of coming up with something so painfully human.

“Molly.” My voice is a croak in the dim room. Its hard to move but I reach my fingers up to thread them through the hair of her scalp. She reacts so violently I think I’ve still got a chunk of her hair wound around my fingers. She flies backwards, away from me and presses her back to the wall, clutching her chest. Her face flames red even in the darkness.

“Oh, god, oh Sherlock, did you hear.. all of that? I’ve got to go. I’ve…” She makes a beeline for the door and without bothering to use my considerable processing power to think it through I jump off the bed after her. Cables and straps pull against my skin, but I will not be stopped.

“Bloody hell, Sherlock! Lay back down, now! You’ve gone and ripped out your IV.” She pushes me back to the bed and instantly Dr. Molly is here. She pulls gloves from the wall and snaps them onto her hands before rifling through a rolling cart of drawers and comes up with gold. “Utterly ridiculous, you’re a child, do you know that? Unbelievable.”

I get to watch a different iteration of Molly, now. Her movements are so sure, so efficient that it looks effortless and I decide that this must be her true form. She is comfortable in this skin. She apologizes as the needle sticks but I only feel the hand that delicately holds my forearm. She reattches the IV before cleaning up the mess I made on the floor, drips of whatever fluids were being pumped into my body and puts it all into the proper receptacles. Then My Molly is back, wringing her hands and staring at the floor, nervous.

“You can’t get up, Sherlock. Please stay put.”

“I will. Only if you promise not to leave again. I need to talk to you.”

“Sherlock…”

“Please, Molly. Your word. Give me your word.” A nearly imperceptible nod. “Can I stand at least, if I’m very careful? This isn’t really how I’d like to do this, you know, ill and in a dress. I won’t yank on anything important I promise.”

Another nod and I carefully get up, making a show about not disturbing anything that ought not to be disturbed. She’s staring at her feet.

“Molly. I… There are so many things that I want to tell you. The simplest of them being that, I am so deeply sorry.” She goes to cut me off, stepping much closer, but I shush her and continue, “I have caused you so much pain over the years, telling myself that you would be safer if I pushed you away. I have always believed, said so many times before to you and John and Mycroft, myself more than anyone, that love is merely a chemical defect. Grit in a sensitive instrument, a crack in the lens. Bothersome, inconvenient, and detrimental. I was wrong, Molly, I was so wrong. Every bit of it was bullshit. Infatuation is the problem, not love. No, love is… is something else. Real love, true love is not a weakness, not a burden. Real love gives you strength, gives you clarity, rewrites your perception. Emotional context!

“When Mary shot me, do you remember? When Mary shot me, it was you who came to save me. Not literally you, but a figure of you giving me the wherewithal to fight for my life, the ability and clarity to follow through. It was your voice in my head that kept me alive. I am saved because of you, Molly Hooper. I am saved for you and my life... my life is yours to do with as you shall. It is yours, I am yours.

“You have… have blessed me with clarity, bestowed upon me something greater than I can comprehend. I love you, Molly. I am very much in love with you.”

Her face is stuck in an amusing disbelief. Stalled, silent, frozen in place, mouth dropped open. Well, then, if she won’t do it, I certainly will. One, two, three careful strides pulling the rolling stand with me and I am close enough to touch her. Instead I reach around her and gently push the door shut, never letting my eyes stray from hers. When it clicks, I let my hands go carefully to cradle her face, pushing a stray piece of hair behind her ear and letting my thumbs ghost over her cheekbones.

Her lips part, only barely, and her head tilts, eyelids fluttering shut. I take the movement for what it is, an invitation, and close the distance. At first, my lips touch hers so gently that it’s almost as if they’re not. This barely there kiss, this barest brush of lips is monumental, like wild horses stampeding through my veins. She seems to be bolstered by the feeling as well, pushing on to the tips of her toes, wrapping her fingers through my hair and pressing her lips against mine with a passion not unrivaled by my own. She pulls away for half a second, just to readjust her head but it sends a plaintive shock through to my stomach and my brain goes all grunty and neanderthal. Want. More. Molly. Love. Molly Hooper. My Molly, dearest, darling Molly. The sweet kisses are evolving, rather rapidly, into something else entirely. It’s all teeth and tongue, ragged breathing and my fingers pressed into her waist. I’ve decided that this could easily become more addictive than any drug I’ve ever bothered trying before. All I can do is want so much that it seems to be causing me physical pain. I am diverted by it, by her, when there’s a shrill beeping from behind us, and we jump apart like we've been electrocuted.

My heart, my apparently very real heart had been set-off, beating fast and erratic. Ah! The pain. At least that explains that. I throw myself into my bed and cover up just as the nurse walks through the door to check on me.

“Are you alright?” She stops the wailing on the monitors and starts looking over me to make sure I’m undamaged. “Glad to see you awake.”

“Yes, well, I’m fine, just got startled.” My wits are returning for the most part and I give her a glance. Efficient, hard-working, bright, and not buying it at all. I watch as she glances between Molly, hand to her throat, trying not to giggle, and I, noting how the subtle shade of Molly’s lipstick is smudged on not one but both of our mouthes.

“Sure. Please do try to stay in bed, at least, Mr. Holmes.” She pulls the door to behind her and Molly steps closer, looking nervous and shy, closed in on herself. I reach and pull her hand to me, pressing light kisses onto her palm and wrist. I'd never thought I'd be good at genuine romance but knowing what to do, how to make her feel good, is pleasantly instinctive.

“Did you really mean any of that, Sherlock? I know that… I don’t want you to think you have to… Just because she made you say those…”

“I’m a lot of things, Molly, but I’ve never been one for protecting the feelings of others. I don’t say things that I don’t mean. I love you, Molly Hooper. I mean it. Truly.”

“I love you, too, Sherlock Holmes.”


End file.
